


In Mutual Orbit

by what_alchemy



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-15
Updated: 2011-03-15
Packaged: 2017-10-17 00:25:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/170962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Uhura's relationship with Jamie Kirk evolves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Mutual Orbit

Jamie Kirk is a gravitational force. Nyota has known women like her before: flawed women of middling beauty who inspire dizzying obsession through inexplicable means. Pheromones ungifted to mere mortals, some elusive attraction simmering just beneath the skin and behind the eyes, invisible to Nyota no matter how she’d search.

“I mean, is she really even that pretty?” she asks Gaila one night after Jamie’s left their room, prompted by Nyota’s arrival and ensuing hostility. The room is heady with the thick smell of freshly satisfied cunt, human and Orion. Nyota throws open a window and stands, hands on hips on her side of the room, waiting for Gaila to answer.

Gaila stretches, naked and unashamed, green skin slick with exertion and satiation. This is the eighth time Nyota has returned to their dorm room to find Jamie and Gaila interlocked in an ecstatic riot of heaving bodies and cascading hair, copper and bronze.

“And you need to start using our signal so I don’t keep walking in on you fucking. We’ve talked about this.”

“We get caught up,” Gaila replies, unconcerned. “You could join us sometime, you know. Let yourself go a little.”

“Even if I swung that way, Jamie Kirk is the last woman in the galaxy I’d get into bed with.”

Gaila looks unconvinced. “You’re missing out,” she says. “Jamie works out her tongue muscle, did you know that?”

Nyota rolled her eyes. “Look, it’s not my business if every woman other than me wants in Kirk’s pants. I just don’t get the appeal.”

“Sometimes it’s chemical, what’s between two people.”

“Two people?” Nyota snorts. “Please. Last week, Frajalax, you know, that pilot from Pyrrus II? Ran out of the cafeteria crying because she saw Kirk with her hand up some other cadet’s skirt. And Pyrrans don’t even have tear ducts!”

Gaila blinks guileless eyes at her and shrugs.

“Jamie is unbound. On Orion we have a saying: the slavegirl in the cage should not envy the soaring bu’untum when her own door is unlocked.”

—

  
During the early months after the launch of the five-year mission, Kirk grows into her captaincy enough to earn just a modicum of Nyota’s respect. Nyota nonetheless catalogues by hand each bumbling first contact, each ambassador’s daughter in tears, each milk-run mishap. According to her notes, Kirk’s missteps grow fewer as the mission wears on, and there’s even a rumor that she’s given up chasing every skirt – or whatever other culturally appropriate item of female clothing – that crosses her path when her away parties have alighted on planetary bodies long enough to get into trouble.

When Nyota finds her pummeling a punching bag alone in a rec room after losing a crew member on a mission that should have been simple and risk-free, Kirk’s own blood is slicking the bag, throwing up a spray at each impact, dripping on the floor. Her fists are raw pulp and her fingers could be broken, but still she mounts a ferocious assault on the bag, sending it swinging like a bloody pendulum in a third-rate horror vid. She doesn’t realize she’s got an audience.

“Captain, you’re hurting yourself.”

Kirk whirls around, blue eyes wild, face streaked with sweat and blood. She’s panting when she says, “Get outta here, Uhura.”

“I’ll comm McCoy for you, then leave you alone, okay?”

Nyota’s reaching for her communicator when Kirk invades her personal space, reeking of sweat and unbrushed teeth and even the swamp they’d had to abandon Morales in six hours ago. She touches Nyota’s wrist, the contact a wet warmth that chills her.

“Don’t. Don’t call him. Please.”

“Someone has to look at that, Kirk.”

Kirk lifts her hands and inspects them, a frown marring her full red mouth. Her faint freckles pop against the blood on her face, and if she wore make up, it’d be down to her chin in rivulets of color. And yeah, maybe that’s one more thing that’s always bugged Nyota about Kirk, that she didn’t seem to have to try to get the attention bestowed upon her, heaven-sent and so natural, and she just accepted that like it was her payment for existing in the universe with the rest of them. But suddenly she only seems young, young and unadorned and full of rage. And grief. Nyota tamps down on the sympathetic trembling that’s begun in her lip.

“Chapel then,” Nyota suggests. “She won’t even blink, much less yell.”

Kirk is nodding, staring unseeing at the mess that her hands used to be.

Nyota comms Chapel and waits with Kirk in the rec room until Chapel arrives with a medpack full of painkillers and regenerators.

Back in her own quarters, Nyota takes out the old-fashioned paper notebook, her painstaking logs of Kirk’s many and varied failures, and sends it down the recycling chute.

—

The rumors of Kirk’s self-imposed celibacy turn out to be true. She and Nyota are waiting in sickbay to get their annual inoculations against various rotting space diseases as well as the yearly contraceptive hypo. Nyota had asked the year before why Kirk even bothered. She’d expected some jocular comment about trying anything once, paired with a dirty wink. Instead, she got a sober look and a chilling single line.

“Because I never want some rapist’s baby in me, Lieutenant.”

Nyota has learned that Kirk faces missions, the admiralty, her interpersonal relationships, all with hopes for the best and preparations for the worst. Kirk smiles with steel in her eyes, if you know how to look. Nyota does, now.

They have to wait for Chapel to get through her brusque speech about side effects and hygienic vigilance with every crew member ahead of them. Kirk, when she’s not on the bridge, is still unaccustomed to stretches of unoccupied time.

“Shoulda brought a padd,” she mutters, on the verge of an epic fidget. Her slender white fingers, pale after two years of living under a starship’s false sunlight, drum against her bicep where her arms are crossed.

“Only nine ahead of us now, Captain,” Nyota says, trying not to let Kirk’s restlessness act as a contagion.

“Bones offered to come by my quarters and shoot me up all private-like, but did I take him up on it? ‘No, Bonesy, I’ll take it on the ass from Chapel just like everybody else, no special treatment.’ Dumbass.”

Nyota laughs.

“Oh God, I forgot these are ass shots. Obviously I repress the memories every year.”

And maybe Kirk is just a little bit beautiful when she’s turning that smile on Nyota, all white teeth and crinkled eyes the color of the Terran sky, but Nyota likes to think she’s still not one of Kirk’s bedazzled acolytes. Nyota is more tempered, more thoughtful than that. If she thinks Kirk is a gorgeous woman now, she knows it’s because her indefatigable spirit and unexpected compassion shine outward and smooth out the bump in her nose, tame the tendency of her hair toward frizz and forgive her slightly overgenerous hips.

“Yeah,” Kirk scoffs. “I’ll never forget a chance to bend over in front of a beautiful woman. This’ll be my first action in months, how sad is that?”

“Seriously? I thought all that gossip was vicious lies and slander.” Nyota bumps her shoulder to Kirk’s.

Kirk’s smile turns wry.

“Got tired of the same old diplomatic aid, alien princess, bored housewife fare. Looking for a different flavor, maybe.” Kirk waggles her eyebrows and blatantly ogles Nyota’s breasts. It’s an old joke now, and Nyota laughs again, slapping Kirk’s arm.

“Not even in your wildest dreams, Captain.”

Kirk’s eyes shutter even as her smile remains. Her tone is light when she says, “Someday I’ll pry you out of those strong Vulcan arms, Lieutenant.”

—

After that, Nyota starts to notice little things that take place between the Captain and the First Officer. Kirk and Spock. Jamie and Nyota’s own steadfast lover. It’s nothing obvious. Nothing anyone else would notice. But Nyota’s elevated her study of Spock to a veritable art form, and her habitual Kirk surveillance is no less thorough for its disparate motivations.

Kirk will wander over to the science station during a slow shift and step directly into Spock’s personal space. And, unlike what she would do to anyone else on her circuit of visits, she will not touch him. No claps on the back, no arms resting against arms, no elbows around the neck. She contents herself with a gaze that never wavers. Nyota is now constantly occupied watching Captain Kirk actively absorb Spock’s presence, reverent and so careful not to let it show. That she is a lover of women seems a laughable, flimsy excuse in the face of so much devotion.

It’s not just Kirk, of course. If it were just Kirk, Nyota would allow herself a twinge of irritation at Kirk’s presumption, but it’s Spock too, and for that, Nyota is running on full stores of dismay and helpless resentment. What she once thought was admirable commitment to duty now seems a sordid obsession. The bi-weekly chess matches, the private meetings to discuss ship’s business. The sheer physicality of their relationship, an inverse of their baseline personalities, Spock reaching outward as Kirk draws in. Nyota observes for interminable days and weeks during away missions and bridge shifts as Spock stands just behind Kirk, turned slightly toward her in a position both protective and respectful. He leans in to speak in low tones near her ears. His eyes track her, dark and heavy, as if she is an otherworldly, _fascinating_ thing.

Bitterness and oily, snaking jealousy flare within her when she asks him to come by after shift and he must decline, citing a previous engagement with the Captain.

“However,” he says when she turns away to hide the sudden mist in her eyes, “the meeting will not persist past 2200 hours. Are you amenable to a visit at that time?”

She only nods. When she gets back to her quarters, she wishes – illogically – that Spock were the type to notice her roiling inner turmoil and coddle her with assurances of his fidelity. She has always disdained of women who expect their partners to know their feelings without explicit statement of them, yet now she is one of them, her lover oblivious by evolution rather than by willful lack of perception.

At precisely 2200 hours ship’s time, Spock is in her quarters, two insistent fingers trailing along her wrist and the back of her hand. She lets him catch her hands fully in his, entwining their fingers and pressing their palms together until his breath is shallow. She cranes upward and kisses him the way she’s always preferred, human, parted lips and humid breath and agile, velveteen tongues. If her kiss smarts with the metallic sting of desperation, she disregards it, knowing this will be the last time. Spock is maneuvering their tangled bodies toward her bed, and when her knees buckle and she’s seated, looking up his lean, hard body into his flushed green face, she stops the progress of his heated, roving hands by clasping them together and not letting go. An inquisitive eyebrow quirks upward.

“Are our current activities not to your liking, Nyota?”

“I want to know what you did tonight. With the Captain.”

The brows descend into a furrow barely discernable from his usual placid expression. Spock might appear severe and cold to anyone else, but to her, he seems only confused, even naïve. Her chest feels heavy when she realizes he’s utterly unaware of his own passions, Kirk among them. He is not deliberately hurting her, and neither is Kirk, who must not have lured him into her bordello as Nyota had imagined in her darker moments. With that look on Spock’s face, she cannot even muster the outrage she so wishes stirred her blood.

“We played two games of chess, each of us securing one victory. We discussed the progress of the science department in the Opalmeyer experiment.”

Nyota closes her eyes, tugging Spock down to sit next to her. Facing him, she asks, “Do you realize, Spock, that you initiate sex with me only after you’ve spent a… um, _stimulating_ evening with Jamie?”

She watches him consult his eidetic memory, and she watches him realize she’s not indulging the illogical human propensity toward hyperbole.

He opens his mouth to say something, but it snaps shut in the ensuing silence. His lips turn down in the slightest expression of remorse. Nyota kisses him on one cheek.

“You and I will be friends again someday, Spock. For now, can you just try to keep it discreet? Just for the next little while, as a favor.”

“Nyota, I am uncertain of your meaning. I require more explicit elaboration.”

With a deep breath, Nyota goes to the door leading from her quarters out to the corridor. She stands to the side with one arm resting on the jamb in the universal nonverbal invitation to leave, a gesture not even lost on Vulcans. Or half Vulcans who make games of being deliberately obtuse.

“I am terminating our romantic relationship so we can both pursue more satisfying partnerships. Live long and prosper, Spock.”

When he leaves, Nyota does not cry.

The next day on the bridge, there is no tension or awkwardness. Nothing has changed, and now she’s sure Spock didn’t run – take a brisk walk – to Kirk’s quarters the night before to inform her immediately of recent developments in his availability. Nonetheless, there is a dynamic between them bursting with unrealized potential, even in the occupied moments when neither is looking at the other. From her perch at the communications console, in the periphery of their lives, Nyota sees them as they truly are: two stars locked in mutual orbit.

—

Kirk and Spock are not ostentatious in their affections. They do not exchange sappy looks uncharacteristic of either of them over long hours on the bridge, they do not skitter away from time to time to commune with each other’s naked bodies, they do not call each other by cloying nicknames or engage in revolting public displays.

The discretion is not just for Nyota’s sake, though she appreciates it. They are quiet in love out of respect for Spock’s reserve and Kirk’s independence. Without much visual confirmation, some crew members express, always out of the Captain’s earshot, confusion and even doubt over her apparent change of orientation. Nyota, in weak, speculative moments, also wonders at the mechanics, if not the veracity.

Kirk laughs when Nyota brings it up on shore leave nearly a year after the personal relationship between Captain and XO became common knowledge and gossip fodder.

“It’s not like that,” Kirk says, leaning over the table between herself and Nyota as if disclosing a scandalous secret. “I never said I didn’t like, I don’t know, how guys _looked_ , or whatever, I just—” she shrugs, leaning back and taking a sip of her Cardassian Sunrise, “…never found one who wasn’t an asshole. Other than Bones, who is a special kind of asshole all his own.”

“Penises are weird,” Nyota mutters. She blinks into the murky depths of her fourth alien drink and realizes she’s far drunker than she thought she was. Kirk’s answering laugh is full-throated and unselfconscious.

“We’ll make a Sapphic goddess of you yet, Uhura!”

“I mean, how do you get used to them after vaginas? They’re all—” Nyota made a loose pumping gesture. “…angry.”

“Am I really gonna have a conversation with my boyfriend’s ex about how _not angry_ his awesome retractable penis is?”

“No,” Nyota says, gulping back her drink to the dregs. “No, absolutely not.”

“Come on, man up, Uhura. You getting the hot meat injection yourself, lately? As long as we’re on the subject and asking vaguely insulting questions.”

The truth is, Nyota has been out with a series of inadequate men from communications, security and science, all of them painfully Not Spock. But when Montgomery Scott issued a stuttering invitation to eat dinner in an empty warp nacelle, Nyota set Spock aside and savored human-cool lips against her own.

It is very new, but it sends a warmth spreading up her body to think of him now. The hum of her feelings for him, her tactless, gentle engineer with the map of calluses along his palms, inspires a curious sadness for the Nyota of the past who worked so hard to suppress those same feelings in deference to a man who couldn’t nurture them. Montgomery looks at her with naked adoration, and God help her if she doesn’t love him all the more for it. Kirk draws something from Spock that Nyota cannot touch, and Nyota no longer feels a bitter cold at the loss.

“Maybe a wee bit o’ joy,” she says after moment’s consideration of the ramifications. But she’s drunk, she’s in love, and she’s not ashamed. Kirk’s eyes go as wide as the Federation’s reach into space.

“No shit!” she exclaims. “How is everyone not talking about this?” She gestures eagerly to a server with three tails to get them another round, this one celebratory.

“Well,” Nyota whispers, also sharing conspiracies now, “the lesbian and the robot just make a much more compelling love story.”

—

Early in the final year of the mission, Nyota picks up a distress call on a faint frequency. She establishes visual, and Kirk orders it transferred to the viewscreen.

What the bridge crew faces now is a severe woman of indeterminable age, hollow-cheeked and pallid. Her red hair was shaven haphazardly some time ago and now grows in uneven patches along her crown. She is not self-conscious.

“I am relieved to have reached a Federation vessel,” she says, voice hard and clear. “I am Diana Wintergreen from the Terran colony on Calliope II.”

“Ms. Wintergreen, hello. I’m Captain James T. Kirk, USS _Enterprise_. How can we assist you?”

Diana took a deep breath. “Captain, the story’s too long for the time we have. Suffice it to say, our colony has become a fascist state. A series of escalating laws has culminated in the internment of women ages twelve to fifty-five and the extermination of those under- or over-age. Anyone who resists is executed. Those of us surviving are impregnated against our wills, and if the fetus is female, it is forcibly aborted. We had a rebel alliance working the underground, but… but we were captured, our leader beheaded like an animal. Pleas for aid from other colonies on Calliope II have been intercepted. We have prayed for a starship to be monitoring this frequency, Captain. We have prayed for you.”

The bridge is silent. Nyota refuses to dishonor Diana’s ordeal by turning away from her to look at Kirk. She can imagine Kirk quite clearly: more upright than Spock, jaws clenching, eyes blazing.

“Mr. Chekov, lay in a course to Calliope II,” Kirk says in a flat voice. “Ms. Wintergreen, please relay your exact coordinates. At warp seven, we can be in orbit in under five hours, upon which time I’ll beam down with an away team to your location and effect a rescue mission. See you in five hours, Ms. Wintergreen.”

The screen returns to its usual view of open space and Kirk whirls around to face the science and communication consoles.

“Mr. Spock, Lieutenant Uhura, walk with me. Sulu, you have the conn.”

They exit the bridge on either side of their Captain, walking in silence. They reach a meeting room before Kirk addresses them.

“Mr. Spock, I’m leaving you in command. Uhura, you’ll be joining me on the away mission, along with Chapel, Kranton from tactics and Fortescue from security.”

“Captain—”

“What? What, Mr. Spock? You got a problem with an all-female away team?” This is her challenge to Spock. Kirk is practically crackling, and Spock’s expression is one of obstinance.

“Captain, it would not be logical to send female staff to a colony currently engaged in committing atrocities against the female portion of its population. I propose that I go in your stead with a team of armed men.”

Nyota watches Kirk flush, her mouth parting and her frown deepening into an ugly gash that splits her face.

“Oh, it wouldn’t be _logical_ , would it? Tell me, Spock, if it’s _logical_ to send burly men armed to the teeth to meet a group of women who have been _raped_ and _traumatized_ by the burly armed men from their own colony. Tell me how that’s gonna go down and if their reactions will be as _logical_ as you hope.”

Spock says nothing but straightens, clasping his hands behind his back.

“So that’s settled.” Kirk takes a breath and a step back from Spock. “Uhura, you’ve always been a good shot, you in?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Captain, as a compromise, allow me to accompany the away team for increased security.”

“Are you kidding me right now?” Kirk reels to face him. “I don’t need your ‘increased security,’ and I don’t need you freaking out those women on Calliope II. Right now, you’re going to meet with maintenance to ready the guest quarter decks to receive between five hundred and one thousand refugees. Dismissed, First Officer.”

Spock’s face is utterly inscrutable even to Nyota, but behind his eyes is a mutinous fire. When he’s gone, Kirk sinks into a seat at the table, exhaling loudly.

“We’ll save those women, Captain,” Nyota tells her.

“He’s always like this,” Kirk says quietly. Nyota, having made a Starfleet career out of discerning the slightest variations in tone and pitch, detects the subtle quaver in her Captain’s voice. “Acting like I can’t point a phaser without him.”

“You’re making the right call.”

Kirk turns and looks up at her. She looks like a child’s watercolor painting, yellow and blue and pink running together on a blank page. She looks wrecked and cannot go back to the bridge like that.

“I hope so, Lieutenant.”

When the away team beams down into a stark basement space, Diana Wintergreen and three other women are waiting for them. Without the limited view, Nyota can see that Diana is pregnant. They’re all pregnant.

“We’re so glad you’re here,” Diana says after they’ve exchanged names and handshakes. “We haven’t been able to rustle anyone up on that frequency, and all the clearer ones are watched. Anyway, we’re safe here. The guards patrol the perimeter of the complex, but not the grounds. Not even medical staff stay on the premises.”

“Ms. Wintergreen, how many refugees can I anticipate? We’ll have to transport everyone in batches.”

“I understand, Captain. After I spoke with you, I made a count of everyone in every building. There are nine hundred forty-three women here. Fourteen are recovering from recent childbirth. Two hundred ninety-four are pregnant.”

Nyota feels her throat closing. She hears Kirk swear.

“And the newborns?” Kirk ventures after a moment. A creeping horror seizes Nyota’s gullet.

“They’re taken away immediately,” Diana says, face blank.

“We don’t even get to hold them,” another woman, Amandine, blurts out. “This will be my second, and I didn’t even get to look at my first.”

Kirk’s fists clench at her sides. She looks each former colonist, each prisoner, in the eyes. Green impassive, blue desperate, gray anguished, brown furious.

“And you realize there’s a risk of miscarriage during the transportation process?”

“We don’t care,” Marilla says, spitting in her ferocity. “We. Do. Not. Care.”

The pause settles heavily over them until Chapel breaks it with her typical pitiless efficiency. It is a relief.

“Take me to the women who’ve just given birth and anyone who’s close. They need to be prepped for beaming.”

“Keep your communicator on,” Kirk tells her, “and have them beamed up as soon as they’re transport-ready.”

Chapel nods, hefting up her med kit. Marilla leads Chapel away, straightbacked and unbowed despite her burgeoning belly, her shorn hair, the deep violet ringing her eyes.

“We can beam up Amandine and Veronica immediately,” Kirk says. “Ms. Wintergreen, if you would do me the honor of escorting my team around the complex, we can begin evacuation.”

Kirk leads them out of the basement and into each building as Nyota and Kranton flank Diana, Fortescue bringing up the rear. Nyota, despite the growing fatigue in her arm, never lets the phaser in her hand waver.

Over the next four hours, the team sweeps the complex and beams the refugees to safety on the _Enterprise_. Some of them, more than a few, call them angels sent by God.

In retrospect, Nyota can see that the entire rescue was too easy, went too smoothly. No security personnel died, no unborn babies failed to rematerialize properly in the transporter beam, no political corruption kept justice from raining down on the heads of the perpetrators. Kirk had even been awarded a commendation. They’d paid no price for their good fortune, and the universe would demand remuneration.

—

The bridge in the weeks following the rescue on Calliope II is characterized by icy silence. The Captain’s professionalism has a sour edge while the First Officer appears to have turned to stone. At the ends of shifts, Kirk is quick to leave, and Spock lingers, waiting out the threat of her presence as if she’s a storm. Chekov looks as though his parents are divorcing, and maybe he’s not the only one.

As messy break-ups go, Nyota supposes it could be worse. There are no loud, humiliating scenes, no trash talk, no vindictive assignments, which, Nyota admits, she no longer expects of the Captain. The only way Nyota knows it’s really over and not just a rough patch is when she’s having drinks with Monty on shore leave, and she sees Kirk leave the establishment with a square-shouldered, petite woman wearing a punishing expression. Nyota feels a heaviness settle over her chest at the sight.

Montgomery turns to follow the line of her gaze, then faces her again, shrugging his shoulders, eyes rather apologetic.

“Got to move on sometime, I suppose,” he says. “’s’funny, how it’s like someone died. Just two people going their separate ways.” He tips back his glass, swallowing the thick native stout of the Tyrovian system.

“I just thought… I don’t know,” Nyota trails off. “It’s stupid.”

“Nothing you could say could possibly be stupid, love.”

She takes a breath. “I just thought they were… symmetrical, or something. Like they really were meant to be together, and as long as they were, everything was gonna be all right.” She shakes her head. “See? Stupid.”

“Och, no, that’s not stupid, Nyota. I think it’s how we all felt. I mean, once we got over how mad Spock was for throwing over the perfect woman for the likes of Kirk.”

Nyota laughs, nudging Monty under the table with her boots. He’s got that soggy look on his face like he can’t believe she’d choose him of all the men on the _Enterprise_ , in the star system, in the universe. Of course she has, though. And of course she always will: his brown eyes are warm, and he holds her hand, and they stop talking about Kirk and Spock’s tale of woe.

The end of the night, however, finds Nyota and Montgomery coming upon Kirk sitting propped against her hotel room door, next to their own, knees up, head in her arms. Nyota and Montgomery exchange a look before Nyota leans down to tap Kirk on the shoulder.

“You all right, Captain?”

Kirk looks up, bleary-eyed and slack-jawed.

“Uhura,” she croaks. Her breath has enough alcohol content to drop Monty’s Uncle Murdo. Nyota groans.

“All right, Captain, let’s get you inside.” Nyota kneels and wriggles an arm behind Kirk’s back, attempting to get her on her feet. Kirk giggles, a high, thin sound Nyota finds foreign and alarming.

“Finally can’t resist me, huh Uhura? Scotty, you can’t watch.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Captain,” Montgomery assures her, ducking down to help her get up. But Kirk’s a pile of dead weight and twisting, uncooperative limbs.

“Where’s your key card?” Nyota asks.

“I can’t find ’em,” Kirk sighs into Nyota’s neck. “All gone.”

“Monty, can you go down to the front desk and get a spare?”

Montgomery looks uncertain, shaking his head.

“Maybe we should look after her for a bit,” he says. “Our room’s got a fine fold-out sofa, and we can make sure she’s all right tonight.”

Nyota lets out an exasperated huff. “I didn’t plan on nursing someone through a broken-hearted bender on our shore leave, Monty.” But his kindness is why she loves him, and even as she says it, she’s hefting Kirk up and propelling her into their room.

Montgomery goes down to the lobby while Nyota tries to wrangle Kirk into some sleepwear and into the fold-out. When Nyota peels her soiled civvies off, Kirk’s skin is mottled with bruises and abrasions, and the white Starfleet panties she’s got on are spotted with fresh blood.

“God, Kirk,” Nyota gasps. “I think we should get you to sickbay. Unless you’re on your period?” she asks, knowing her hope is displaced.

Kirk only moans a “no,” and says she’s fine, it’s not a big deal.

“’s’what I wanted,” she says over and over, clutching the waistband of her underwear as if terrified that Nyota will strip her of them forcibly.

Nyota gets a pair of cotton-equivalent shorts and a tee-shirt on her before finding a soft cloth and soaking it in hot water. She wrings it out and brings it back.

“Maybe this’ll feel good,” she says, pressing it into Kirk’s hands. Kirk is blinking up at her, flushed, the skin around her mouth scraped raw.

“How did you do this?” Kirk whispers.

“How did I do what?”

“Survive, after him.”

Nyota exhales, and then climbs in with Kirk, propping herself against the pillows. Kirk is prone and crooked beside her, careless of the position of her neck as she cranes it at an unnatural angle to stare with penetrating intensity into Nyota’s face. The cloth languishes, clammy, cold and unused in her hands.

“It got better,” Nyota says. “I couldn’t resent his happiness and still feel good about myself, so I had to let it go. You just gotta give it time, Kirk. Jamie.”

But Kirk is shaking her head at that bizarre angle, her eyes going liquid in a way Nyota knows she never meant anyone, much less her, to see. So Nyota looks away to spare them both.

“He hates me,” she’s whispering, “he hates me, he hates me.”

“That can’t be true,” Nyota says, trying to be comforting but unable to bring herself to touch Kirk. They’re not friends like that. “Spock doesn’t hate anyone.”

“He found out about me and he hates me now,” Kirk continues. “Disgusted by me, so he dumped me. Can you believe it? Never been dumped before.” She giggles again. “It _sucks_.”

There’s a timid knock at the door, and Nyota calls out to Montgomery that everyone’s decent and he’s safe to enter.

“Got my hands on some detox pills, if you like, Captain,” he says, voice low as if preserving someone’s sleep.

“Nah, thanks, Scotty. I worked too hard to get sloshed to waste it on that shit.”

“Aye.” Monty smiles at her. He sits on the end of the expansive hotel bed, bending to unlace and loosen his boots.

Nyota chances a glance at Kirk’s face. Her eyes are barely open slits, her mouth a mournful upward curve, somehow sad and amused at once.

“You’re lucky,” Kirk says, “to be strong.”

“You’ll get through this, Jamie. You’re strong too.”

But Kirk shakes her head again, eyes closing.

“No. No. He saw those Calliope girls, how they were. How I am. How strong can we be, after that? How… how can you even blame him?”

“Jesus, Jamie, what are you talking about?” Now Nyota does touch her, a rough jab on the shoulder when Nyota’s stomach goes cold. “Did someone hurt you? That woman at the bar—”

Kirk’s hand closes around Nyota’s wrist to stop her jostling.

“Long time ago, Uhura. Thought it didn’t matter anymore. But it always comes back to you, taking away. Always taking away.”

Nyota looks at Montgomery, whose mouth is hanging open, a black abyss in the middle of his blanched face. He’s got only one sock off. She looks back at Kirk, her wrist caught tight in two hands now, tucked under Kirk’s chin, Kirk’s eyes squeezed shut against her gaze.

“Tell me who, Kirk. We’ll get it sorted out.”

Kirk opens her eyes and lets out another hollow laugh. “Statute of limitation’s up, L.T. I was a kid, alone in the house with my step-dad after my brother left. I was just a kid, a long time ago.”

Nyota swallows back bile and gets out of the fold-out bed, extricating her wrist from Kirk’s grasp with a little too much force. She refuses to let her eyes well even as Kirk’s expression devolves into hurt and bewilderment.

“You stay with her,” she tells Montgomery in a tone she can’t quite regulate. Snatching a communicator from a bedside table, she hails the _Enterprise_ and asks for an immediate beam-up.

Spock is disheveled from sleep and wrapped in a robe when he finally answers her pounding at his door. He blinks dark eyes at her and says her name, a question. She pushes past him into the sweltering heat of his quarters, set to Vulcan-normal. When the door slides shut behind her, she doesn’t bother keeping her voice down.

“Tell me,” she demands. “I want to hear it from your mouth.”

“Nyota, you must specify. I am not certain what you want me to tell you.”

“Tell me you dumped Kirk because she picks her nose, or you’re sick of how much she drinks, or how she turns on the charm on diplomatic missions. Tell me nothing had been going right. Tell me anything but you dumped her because you found out she was a rape victim.” Nyota is panting when she’s finished, and Spock’s gone so stiff she can’t even discern his breath expanding and contracting in his lungs.

“My personal relationship with the Captain is none of your business, Lieutenant. You are dismissed.”

“No, Spock! It’s my business when I just spent the last hour cleaning her up from a rough night and listening to her moan about you when I was supposed to be spending shore leave with my partner. So yeah, this is my business now, and you _will_ explain yourself to me.”

Spock turns away as if unable to look her in the eye. Nyota feels a sick certainty in her gut, that Spock is totally unlike how she’s always imagined him to be. She feels foolish to have imagined him at all, to have imagined that she knew him.

“The Captain was dishonest about the nature of her past sexual encounters. I could not remain in a romantic relationship with her.”

Silence blooms between them like a cancer.

“You son of a bitch,” Nyota whispers. “You son of a bitch.”

“You know nothing,” he growls, his physical presence suddenly a dark specter overwhelming her line of vision, and he is more freakishly alien and demonic than he’s ever been before. “I am not required to justify my actions to you. Remove yourself from my quarters immediately.”

Nyota steps back from him, putting space between herself and his oppressive proximity.

“You’re not who I thought you were. I can’t even stand to look at you.”

Nyota leaves Spock’s quarters without awaiting a reply, a third dismissal. She beams back to the hotel room, where Kirk is sleeping and Monty is waiting. He opens his arms.

In the morning, Kirk inhales Montgomery’s two detox pills, mumbles her thanks, and leaves to find McCoy and Chapel without making eye contact.

—

The mission ends without major catastrophe. Back in San Francisco, Kirk and Spock get medals pinned to their chests, Chekov gets a promotion to lieutenant, and the _Enterprise_ goes into dry dock for a year and a half of repairs and upgrades. Before settling into their teaching obligations at the academy, Nyota takes Montgomery to visit her grandmother in Kenya. When Bibi meets him, she pulls his head down to kiss him on both eyelids. She turns a watery smile on Nyota and welcomes her home.

At the academy, there are long waitlists to get into the _Enterprise_ crew’s classes. Kirk’s has to be moved to an auditorium to accommodate the starry-eyed cadets who crowd the lecture space originally afforded her. Sometimes, before her office hours, Nyota stands in the doorway of that auditorium, watching Kirk make huge gesticulations at the front of the class, animatedly relating her lessons in command. Or, on some days, Kirk is morose, going over torture survival tactics and mental health protocols. Nyota smiles, a faint touch on her lips, remembering how young and stubborn she was in her cadet reds before heading to her office, where she’ll have her own fan club to contend with.

Spock elects to take leave on New Vulcan instead of teaching. Nyota did not speak to him before his departure. She’s not sure she’ll ever speak to him in a non-professional capacity again. The science track cadets grumble enough at Spock’s absence that a petition starts up and is sent to the colony, urging him back for the second semester. The petition is ignored, and Nyota feels resentful of him, as if through this act he is choosing his duty to his people over his duty to Starfleet. It’s not a logical feeling, but she gave up on holding herself to the exacting Vulcan standards of logic long ago.

Montgomery’s mother dies in Dunfermline during the second semester, twenty-three years after going into remission for the first time. Before taking compassionate leave, Monty stays up all night writing page upon page of a eulogy, scribbling them out with expansive hash marks, always starting again on a fresh, blank sheet. Eventually he puts his pen down and rubs his hands over his face, letting out a low, broken moan. Nyota runs her hand through his thinning hair, sets her mouth against the quivering downward curve of his, and holds on to him as his grief crests and crashes. When the weekend comes, Nyota and Keenser hop a transport to Edinburgh and take the train to stand among the mourners as Montgomery delivers his disjointed, inadequate, utterly perfect eulogy.

After the stragglers have left, the vicar’s still there, and in front of God and Keenser and Monty’s grandfather and uncles and sisters and nieces and nephews, Nyota and Montgomery get married. She’s wearing mid-calf steel-toed boots and her dress uniform, he’s in his clan tartan, and it’s more than anything she could have dreamed of when she was small, playing dress-up with Bibi’s veil.

The senior staff and the core bridge crew all enlist for the second five-year mission. The _Enterprise_ has been fitted with the latest in technological advancements. Apparently, this just means making everything on Nyota’s console smaller, her practiced hands fumbling at her controls. Spock is infuriatingly unflappable at the science station despite the upgrades, Chekov and Sulu are wide eyed admiring the shiny new helm, and when Nyota swivels her chair around, she finds Kirk fidgeting in the new, ergonomic Captain’s chair with a frown dragging her entire face downward. She catches Nyota’s eye and grins before grabbing her padd and sending a transmission: _fuckers got rid of my hard-earned ass groove._

Over the next two years, Montgomery loses more hair, eleven crew members die in freak accidents and away mission debacles, McCoy and Chapel stop pretending, Sulu earns a medal for valor, Kirk beds every female (and one male) human and alien that could pass for aesthetically pleasing on away missions, Spock loses weight he couldn’t spare in the first place, and Nyota develops an algorithm that enables the software engineers to add the whistling language of the Krath’n’huli to the universal translator. When the news comes that she’s been invited to speak at the New Vulcan Science Academy on the subject, Kirk hugs her for the first time.

Being on the _Enterprise_ is rarely tedious. Nyota spends her shifts performing her duties to the highest standard, often surpassing even her own lofty expectations when, say, Kirk is in trouble on a hostile planet. During her off duty hours, she finds herself often in Kirk’s company. They do frivolous, necessary things: reprogram replicators to spit out strange alcoholic drinks, talk about the state of Kirk’s latest lay’s bush, watch twenty-second century B-vids with their own running commentary. Neither of them make jokes about braiding each other’s hair, but Monty does, laughing, tugging out Nyota’s sensible ponytail and burying his nose in the resulting cascade. For long stretches of time, Nyota has a satisfying career, a surprising best friend, a devoted husband, and all the happiness she can stand. Then, Spock’s vaunted Vulcan controls, once unimpeachable, shatter.

—

Nyota has kept a near total ignorance of Spock’s personal life for the past several years. The thought of him is bitter in too many ways to keep up more than a passing professional acquaintanceship, so she hasn’t tried. The sight of him, however, is ubiquitous while they both work on the bridge, two members of the senior core crew. For the past few weeks, he’s been on edge, crackling with restless energy, his back a whipcord seeming ready to snap. He’s impossible to ignore when he gives curt responses bordering on sarcastic, he’s impossible to ignore when the fuse of his temper shortens, and he’s impossible to ignore when the Captain orders him off the bridge to speak with her and he goes, following her with a hateful flame blazing behind his eyes. Nyota suppresses a spine-wracking cringe at the look on his face before turning back to her console. She briefly considers tapping into the Captain’s comm device to monitor the conversation and make sure Kirk stays safe, but Kirk can take care of herself, and she wouldn’t appreciate the invasion of privacy anyway.

The bridge crew works silently and diligently through the remainder of alpha shift, each member too focused on their own consoles for the careful attention to duty to be genuine. Nyota knows that like her, they are staring through their stations, deliberating on the consequences of the imminent implosion of their command team, so long in coming. There will be no third mission, maybe they won’t even finish this one, and their makeshift family will be scattered across the galaxy like so much space detritus. Some of them will pursue careers on their own ships, enjoying the fruits of promotion, but there will be no recreating the dynamics of the _Enterprise_.

After shift, Nyota finds Kirk’s door locked and unresponsive to the keycode Kirk gave her. She can’t rustle her up on her comm or her padd. After a moment’s hesitation, she tries Spock’s door, and there’s no response, but Nyota’s built her career on her ears. Through the bulkheads she can hear them in there, crashing against furniture, each other, their conversation a low roar peppered with shouts. Moans. Nyota’s heartbeat loses its steady timekeeping and becomes a nervous stutter against her ribs. Breath quickening, Nyota reels backward and rushes to the turbolift, and the nine seconds it takes to get her to sickbay feel interminable and cruel.

Chapel has a sling on and McCoy is veritably foaming at the mouth when Nyota arrives panting in his office, nervous beads of sweat springing up along her hairline. McCoy’s eyes bug out under the high arch of one brow, his version of a welcome.

“Don’t you tell me you interrupted them,” he growls.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” Nyota says. “I thought they were fighting, but… God, are they really—?”

McCoy’s lips twist in a humorless smile and he grunts.

‘“ Vulcan biology,’ he says. Vulcan biology broke Chapel’s arm and I’m expected to let Jamie go in there to—” He trails off, crossing his arms and turning his head away, shaking it as if to clear cobwebs. Chapel lays her good hand between his shoulder blades.

“You don’t ‘let’ Jamie do anything, Len,” she says in a low voice. “And my arm is barely fractured, so don’t start with the chivalrous Southern gentleman routine.”

McCoy sighs and nudges open the bottom drawer of his desk. He plucks out three glasses and lifts a bottle of bourbon in question. Nyota and Chapel nod, and the three of them huddle around his desk like it’s a fire on a cold night.

“Is she gonna be okay?” Nyota asks after they take their first sips and savor the burn and the silence.

“Amanda Grayson obviously survived it with Sarek, so James T. Kirk will get through it with Mr. Spock, too,” Chapel says when McCoy’s eye threatens to leave its socket altogether. His mouth contorts sourly.

“ _Sarek_ wasn’t so foolish as to let it get this bad before doing something about it! _Sarek_ didn’t keep his _doctor_ in the dark for _years_ about an _inevitability. Sarek_ didn’t break people’s arms when they offered him soup, and _Sarek_ didn’t decide _suicide_ was the answer instead of approaching a certain equally lovelorn starship captain about solving his little problem! Logical my ass!” McCoy slams back the bourbon, squeezing his eyes shut and growling in the aftermath.

“Can we back up and explain this to me? Or is there some kind of doctor-patient confidentiality thing going on? Which you’re still breaking just by hinting at it right now, I want to point out.” Nyota says.

McCoy waves a hand.

“Jamie said to tell you or you’d use some comm frequency to spy on them anyway.”

Nyota refuses to blush; Kirk knows her too well. A swell of affection for her Captain, her friend, burgeons inside her chest.

“So, what’s the deal? Suicide?”

McCoy scowls.

“Apparently, Vulcan males go through a seven-year mating cycle, and if they don’t get lucky they die. Spock was indulging on some nice, very _logical_ denial until Jamie confined him to quarters and Chris brought him some soup. And… well.” He gestured to Chapel’s sling. “Goddamned hobgoblin. Thought his human half would keep him from losing his shit sure as any other Vulcan in the history of Vulcans. Just what in the hell was he thinking?”

“So… Spock’s in heat?”

“Something like that. We’re too far away from New Vulcan to find some suitable pointy-eared lady, and according to himself, only the Captain will do anyway. Some voodoo business about mating bonds and existing mind links and compatibility of the katra. So he went over all noble and locked himself in his quarters to die like a goddamned wounded animal! Who’s so chivalrous now?” More bourbon splashes into McCoy’s cup, only to disappear down his throat.

“And Jamie called his bullshit and hacked into his quarters.”

McCoy points at her, nodding once.

“Got it in one. A kewpie doll for the lady in red.”

“How long is this going to go on?”

McCoy’s face is a thundercloud. Chapel answers, “Oh, days, I’d imagine.” She gives a sly sideways smile at the doctor. “Maybe weeks.”

“You’re not funny, you know.”

Nyota swills her own drink idly. Maybe everything is changing. But instead of breaking under the consumptive tension between captain and first officer, maybe the crew will become the best versions of themselves under a command team united in love and purpose. Maybe they all get to keep their happiness, just for a little while longer, just until the mission ends. Nyota tries to think of it on Kirk’s terms, all her thwarted love finally justified, and not on Spock’s, who is, Nyota thinks now, only an automaton unworthy of Kirk’s tenacious attachment.

Montgomery serves as Acting Captain in Kirk’s and Spock’s joint absence. He’s not fond of command, much preferring the sleek metal innards of a warp engine to the nerve-wracking rigor of holding four hundred and fifty lives in his rough hands, but he does his duty without complaint. Back in their quarters at the end of Day Four, Nyota’s head pillowed on his chest, he’s running his fingers along the skin of her arm. She wonders aloud how much longer he’ll have to act as captain; this is the first snatch of time they’ve gotten alone since Vulcan biology sequestered their commanding officers away for an epic mating session, and she misses her husband.

“Dunno,” Monty answers. “But it’s a bit romantic, isn’t it?”

“Hmm?”

“The Captain and Mr. Spock.”

“I don’t think Spock is the romantic type. Actually, this is kind of just like him, take what he needs when it’s convenient for him, no romance involved. And when he’s done with you, pff.” She casts a hand out as if brushing junk off a table.

Monty catches that hand and brings it up to press his mouth into her palm.

“I know your heart’s not stone in there, love,” he says, linking their fingers and holding her hand over his heart. “You were so angry at him you never saw how he’s looked at her since… since they broke up. You’ve got to forgive him a bit.”

“Seriously? He looks at her like he owns her. Like a child who doesn’t want his favorite toy anymore, but doesn’t want anyone else to play with it either. Monty, I’m tired of that look.”

“Och, don’t get started on one of your ‘I hate Spock’ rants. And I don’t think that’s the look I’m talking about.”

Nyota shifts to face him, propping herself up to hover over him.

“What look then? I see him all the time on the bridge, and he’s decidedly lacking in soppy looks.”

Monty cups her face and draws her in for a slow, thorough kiss. She’s flush against his naked body, legs tangled in his, and they rest their foreheads together. His thumbs rub over her cheekbones, memorizing. When he pulls back to look into her eyes, his own are lit gold with desire and affection.

“It’s when he thinks no one’s looking,” he says. “He looks at her like I look at you.”

—

Kirk and Spock emerge two days later, back on the bridge as if nothing happened. But Spock’s mood is tempered, and Kirk moves with the slightest stiffness in her muscles. Nyota would be concerned if Kirk’s minute discomfort weren’t accompanied by a smug expression and that single filthy eyebrow wag she sent her when she entered the bridge right before shift.

 _So you’re gonna tell me, right?_ Nyota hits send. Nothing’s happened since shift began three hours ago, so she thinks it’s safe.

 _Until you can’t stand to hear any more, LT._

Nyota sneaks a glance at Spock sitting at the science station beside communications. He looks… the same as ever. Nyota vaguely remembers a time when she would drink in the sight of him, straightbacked and concentrating on his analyses. It seems so distant now, so asinine to have to study the man she loved in order to understand him at all. She sends another transmission, this time to Montgomery’s personal padd. His response several minutes later reads _I love you too._

As shift ends, Kirk shares some meaningful looks with Spock before turning that wide grin on Nyota and jerking her head toward the turbolift and leading her to it. It pitches downward toward the officer’s decks, and Nyota bumps into Kirk’s side, but doesn’t make a move to get out of her personal space once the turbolift settles.

“You’re all right, right Jamie?”

The turbolift door slides open to an empty corridor, and Kirk slings an arm around Nyota’s neck, dragging her toward her quarters.

“I swear to every deity I never believed in, Uhura, I’ve never been better.”

Glasses clink as Kirk sets them out on her work table.

“What are we in the mood for?”

“I think this conversation should take place over basic beers.”

Kirk smirks and inputs the proper replication code. They’ve tinkered with it, but so far they haven’t been able to get it to produce anything other than a light, generic pilsner, which is fine for their current purposes. Kirk leans back in her chair and kicks her feet up onto the table, and she regards Nyota with a sort of amused admiration.

“So tell me how close you were to tapping Spock’s quarters,” she says, tilting her glass back into her open mouth.

“Three more hours,” Nyota answers. She props her elbows up on the table, resting her head in one hand as she looks at Kirk. Kirk is changed, the shadows gone from behind her eyes, her shoulders lacking their habitual line of tension. Nyota wonders how long she’s been carrying those things; so long that Nyota only notices them now that they’re gone.

“Jesus, I don’t think I could have taken three more hours. Anyway, we were done day before yesterday, but I needed a rest and some goddamn ointment,” Kirk says, laughing once and shaking her head. “Maybe I’ll be more prepared seven years from now.”

“What _is_ this whole thing, Jamie? I mean, McCoy explained a little, but I don’t think I get it. At all. Seven years? _Mating_ , for Christ’s sake?”

Kirk shrugs.

“I don’t think I get it either. But it was— It was really intense. I mean, he went absolutely batshit, and I was the only thing that could calm him down. He acted like I was… something precious. If we’re not careful, it’ll go to my head.”

Nyota snorts. “Insert comment about your already-swollen ego here, Kirk.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Kirk waves a hand. “No, it was— good. I feel like it was good, even though he’s totally embarrassed about it, and I’ll be walking bow-legged for the next week. I feel like anything I say right now will be a cliché. I just… we don’t have to be apart anymore, you know?”

“I’m having a hard time seeing how you could forgive him. He really treated you like shit, Jamie.”

Kirk puts her feet back on the floor and leans forward on her elbows. She wraps her hands around her glass. She takes a moment to fill her lungs to capacity, exhaling slow and even.

“When we were in his quarters,” she says, “doing our business, I _felt_ him. Jesus, I mean, obviously I felt him, but I mean, we were together, in our minds. One person, one spirit, one body, just… together, in a total and complete way I can’t even describe right. It was… transcendent. And I knew his motives and his conflicts, and I just… there’s nothing to forgive, Uhura. He was… doing what he thought was best. In a really shitty way, without offering me the explanation I deserved, but it wasn’t malicious, and it wasn’t like, some judgment he made on me, which is how it felt, before.

“I wish— I wish we didn’t have to go through four years of hurting each other and being apart to get here, but. We’re here now, and I finally feel like, like I’ve arrived where I’m supposed to be, and I’m who I’m supposed to be, and I’m with who I’m supposed to be with, and I’m really— happy.” She lifts one shoulder in a shrug, her expression hesitant, as if Nyota will laugh uproariously at her admission. “Like I said, cliché.”

Nyota wants to pry. Nyota wants to know exactly what Spock’s motives were, and she wants pick them apart, analyzing them piece by piece like something tangible to be measured. She wants details and reports and explanations with footnotes, she wants Spock to earn the grace Kirk is bestowing upon him, she wants him to prove his worth to her. Instead, she pokes a code into the replicator, and it spits out what passes for cookies covered in a layer of chocolate. Not exactly beer food, but it’s what they like while they braid each other’s hair.

“I’ll try to understand,” she says, pushing the plate of cookies between them. “So, are you bondmates now?”

Kirk nods. “Yeah.” A laugh. “Jamie Kirk gets a shotgun wedding after all. Riverside would be proud.”

“Don’t let him pull his superior no-emotions Vulcan bullshit on you, anymore. Promise me.”

Kirk shifts, drawing her shoulders in defensively. She swallows down a few mouthfuls of replicated beer, and lively blue eyes meet Nyota’s over the rim of the glass.

“Ah, Uhura,” she says with a tiny smile, “you’re my favorite girl, always looking out for me. But seriously, me and Spock, we’re fine. We’re gonna be fine. I’m not saying we won’t have fights and shit, I mean, who doesn’t? But… I _get_ him, you know? I mean I _really_ get him, and… and we’re gonna be just fine. You can quit worrying, and you can, I don’t know, call a cease fire between you and him, or whatever you need to do to become civil again.”

“I call best friend rights to be suspicious and constantly give him the hairy eyeball for a period of five years.”

“I guess that’s fair.”

That’s as much satisfaction as she’s going to get on the subject, for now. Nyota programs herself another beer and kicks back, slouching in her chair and putting her feet up.

“So,” she says, giving Kirk a furrowed brow and downturned mouth: her serious face. “Let’s talk about what’s important. How was the sex?”

Kirk’s laugh echoes off the bulkheads.

—

After the third mission, the admiralty bangs a gavel and the _Enterprise_ is retired permanently. She goes into dry dock where she was born, Kirk’s own dried up, cornhusk hometown. Cadets run simulations on her during their third years, and tourists pay 65 credits a pop to walk through the corridors and rooms where some of Nyota’s finest memories took place, oohing and aahing and never really comprehending. Nyota and Monty choose to raise their children in San Francisco, where Nyota lectures on xenolinguistics and experiments on the ever-evolving universal translator at the academy, and Monty holes up for days at a time tweaking warp cores and making the sleek new ships run faster and quieter and cleaner.

Almost twenty years after the establishment of the colony, Spock finally answers the call to return there to live and rebuild. New Vulcan has flourished in that time, but Spock’s people still face extinction, their birth rates low, their gene pool limited. At the outset, geneticists anticipated that birth defects would occur with increasing frequency after the third generation to be born on the colony. Amid outcry and many citations of opposing modes of logic, the elders began to encourage interspecial unions with Remans, Romulans, Terrans, Betazoids and Andorians. There are more combinations each time different planets send aid; Vulcans, for all their logic and suppression of emotion, fall easily in love with the aliens who come and add color to their stark and sandy way of life. There are successes and failures, xenophobic attacks on new families and formations of interspecial friendship foundations, and every reaction in between.

On visits to the city of Shri’hazukh to see her friends, Nyota notes that Jamie’s smile is echoed in her quarter-Vulcan children, and the happy flash of curved lips and pearly teeth is a common sight as people, Vulcan and otherwise, go about their business in the capital. Vulcans have found a measure of peace here, within themselves and amid the tumult of emotions that other races have brought to their growing colony. For the first time, Nyota believes that their lofty talk of IDIC is truly in practice.

Today, Nyota and Monty are late. Their shuttle was delayed, and the rest of the gang should be there already. When they arrive, Spock answers the door, a tiny girl with delicately pointed ears and a riot of black curls propped in the crook of one elbow. T’Mina squeals and offers a grin dotted with teeth, reaching out with chubby hands, and Spock allows himself the smallest smile.

“Nyota, Montgomery, boys. It is very pleasant to see you again.”

Nyota had given up on babying Spock’s stodgy sensibilities long ago, and now she wraps her arms around him and the rather adorable fruits of his last ponn farr, squeezing with more force than is necessary. T’Mina gurgles in protest, gasping out Nyota’s name until she lets go. Montgomery scoots past them into the welcoming air conditioning of the house, and Adam and Benjamin tear through the front hall calling out to Samek, a much more sedate little boy than Nyota’s own darling terrors.

Spock had failed to mention during the first agonizing plak tow that a Vulcan’s sperm at the height of his Time, as Spock liked to call it with a demure pout, was so powerful that it overcame the yearly contraceptive hypos and triggered ovulation almost instantly, and so Samek’s first years were spent on the _Enterprise_. He was soon joined by Monty and Nyota’s own Adam, Hannah Chapel-McCoy, and, everyone’s favorite surprise, Oksana Chekova Sulu, the result of a ‘gift’ from the Ormidians of Lorisivar VI. After T’Mina, Kirk got her tubes tied, finished out the final mission, and she and Spock both settled into teaching positions at the New Vulcan Science Academy.

“Sure I’d love to captain a ship again,” she’d said at the time, idly stroking the downy hair along T’Mina’s crown. “And I will, I think, like a science vessel or something. But I’m gonna be there for my kids, put salve on their scraped knees, read them bedtime stories, give them a hard time about their crushes. Space, the stars: they’ll be there after the kids grow up and can’t stand the sight of us anymore.”

Spock, Monty, McCoy, Chapel, Chekov and Sulu mill in the kitchen as Spock tends to the forthcoming meal. T’Mina doesn’t often let her father out of her sight, so there she stays as the adults catch up after years apart, talking Federation policy and low-down Starfleet gossip alike. Nyota kisses her hellos and asks appropriate questions about everyone’s respective careers, lets Chekov and Sulu coo at her belly, but soon she slips out in search of an unabashed ringing laugh, blonde hair, big hand gestures – her closest friend.

Nyota finds Kirk upstairs in Samek’s loft, surrounded by all the _Enterprise_ babies now grown reedy and endearingly awkward, reenacting – exaggerating – the mission where she and Spock had to battle talking dinosaurs twenty times their size. Nyota leans in the doorway smiling as Kirk roars and the children (excepting Samek) shriek. Kirk makes gnashing noises, then bellows, “And you know what dinosaurs’ favorite food is? KIDS!”

She swoops down and grabs Benji, who is four and therefore still grabbable, swinging him up into the air and burying her face in his belly to blow a devastating raspberry. Benji squeals and clutches at Kirk’s hair, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She catches Nyota’s eye, face lighting and grin growing impossibly wider, and sets Benji back down.

“Samek, why don’t you go bother your father and get your friends some ice cream?” Kirk says. “Tell him I said one scoop was okay.”

Samek is a solemn little boy who holds Oksana’s hand as he leads the string of chattering kids downstairs. Facing Nyota fully, Kirk thrusts her thumb in their direction.

“Says he’s gonna marry her,” she says with a smirk.

“Chekov planning the wedding yet?”

“Better believe it, L.T.”

Then Nyota’s caught in a ferocious hug, breathing in the warm, clean scent of her former captain, the consuming happiness of this reunion a bright star flaring in the center of her chest. They whirl and laugh, locked together for long moments before they part.

“How is everything?” Kirk asks, her hands lingering at Nyota’s shoulders. “Making a new baby, I see. So pissed you didn’t tell me earlier, by the way.”

“I knew we were all gonna be here, so I wanted to surprise you. It’s a girl this time. I’m giving her four more months until eviction.”

Kirk makes an indistinct, happy sound and gathers her up in another short embrace.

“I fucking _missed_ you, you know?” she says when she’s grinning down at her again.

Nyota only nods, feeling the strain of a smile gone on too long, but not caring. Kirk puts an arm around Nyota’s neck just like she used to, pulling her out of Samek’s loft. They catch up on all the frivolous, necessary things they miss out on, living on separate planets.

The urgency of their youth is gone, the _Enterprise_ a clunky relic. They lead calm lives these days, their students marveling at them, disbelieving that their instructors were once the fiercest guardians of Federation space; they have passed into legend, into comfort and domesticity. The grand days of the _Enterprise_ may have come and gone, but the bonds forged in her corridors, on every deck, in meeting rooms and mess halls, officer quarters and supply closets, are as infinite as space and unbreakable. Jamie Kirk is a gravitational force, and, almost twenty-five years after they first met, Nyota is content in her position as one satellite among many.  
 **End**

Read the sequel, [Rebirth](http://archiveofourown.org/works/170964)


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